Una Sinverguenza

There are snakes in the water. Don't swim. If you swim in that water you will be slithering around with snakes, both visible and invisible. Do they bite? No? Do they sting? No. Then what harm can they do? They talk. Talk? Yes, talk. They will be watching everything you do in there. The size of your ass in that bathing suit. How well or how poorly you swim. They will swim through your legs and then call you a slut for liking it. Who do they talk to? Each other. Then who cares. Everyone. Why? Because nothing else matters.

I was asked the question: What keeps you from writing honestly? The answer was easy. The snakes in the water. What has stood between me and my most honest writing is the same as what led me to writing in the first place. Shame. The many layered complex of shame that is both cultural and personal. In the language in which I was raised, Spanish, to be called una sinverguenza is an insult of the highest order. It translates literally as shameless or without shame, but it has larger connotations of revealing, to the invisible we of a world that is always watching, that you are callous, heartless, and somehow don't care about your family or community. It is heavy with bad intentions, and infused with the idea of willful disregard for all that we were taught as children, mostly to keep our heads down in shame.

Sinverguenceria is an adjective morphed from the noun sinverguenza. It is used to describe any and all behavior that might get the snakes talking. Sinverguenceria is most likely not found in a dictionary, but its name is deeply embedded in the hearts of those who might commit some act that falls within its range.

What keeps me from writing honestly are all the things I can't say about the people I come from, the people I love, the places that made me. Why?

If you write about Puerto Ricans you can't mention anything about roaches, welfare, switchblades, the quality of their English or the quality of their Spanish, and be sure not to bring up drug addicts, drug dealers, alcoholics, wife beaters, child abusers, bad mothers, abusive or absent fathers, dirty old men, mean cold hearted old women, child services, foster care, the colonial status of a people who go to war at the behest of a congress they have no representation in, the obsessive love for a flag that does not represent a country but an idea of nationhood never realized, and be sure that you don't make them maids, supers, janitors doormen or factory workers . . .

Why?

Because. And be sure not to call them lazy, stupid, or thieves. Don't put grease in their hair, and make sure all the men are married to the women, no one goes to jail, the children are never born out of wedlock, and no one is gay.

Why?

Because that is all that has ever been written about us, those are the only names we have been called and it is your job to change that. Why would you give them more reasons to look down on us? Don't they have enough?

But I don't write about all the people. It's not about everyone. It's just a story.

If you know how to write, (which if you can't do anything but write what you live means you probably don't have much imagination), but if you do write, if you must, and people will read it, then you have to write about the good things. You have to write about the Puerto Rican doctors, nurses, teachers, lawyers, judges. Write about our pride in our culture and how clean our houses are and how good our food is and how happy, kind, hardworking, and gentle we are. Write about our hospitality, our beautiful women who always win Miss Universe, our beautiful island, our sense of family loyalty. Write about the coqui. Write about that. Don't write about poverty, racism and all the things that went...